If you are following the battle of the short messaging systems, you might think it is a one-dimensional contest between the systems that maintain your chat history for all time – like Twitter and Facebook – and the so-called disappearing messengers – like Snapchat – where messages vanish after being read. Read More

The K-Y-A in KYA Anlytics stands for “Know Your Audience,” and founder and CEO Jeff Weisbein said that’s exactly what he’s trying to help online publishers do.
Weisbein has been in those shoes himself, have created and run the tech site BestTechie for more than a decade (though he took some time away from it to work as an analyst at Mashwork, now known as Canvs.tv). Read More

Capitalizing on the falling cost of launch services and the miniaturization of satellites, a new breed of startups are gearing up for the space race under the moniker of NewSpace.
At a recent conference in San Jose, Calif., leading figures in this NewSpace movement (a term used to describe the startups that stand in the shadows of space industry giants such as Boeing and Lockheed-Martin)… Read More

Manhattan, 2040: Alice wants to open an antiques store. Chelsea seems like a good location. She has to find 150 square meters to move the items that she has collected over the years, and to go on a tour of flea markets in Eastern Europe, her area of expertise. She needs to finance the imports. The problem? She doesn’t have enough money to get started. Read More

It’s still early days in the bacteria becomes our food production process. However, several Silicon Valley scientists are creating lab-grown edibles of the truly bizarre or mixing up animal substitutes based on some interesting ingredients. Here are 10 of them. Read More

“We’re watching you.” This was the warning that the Chicago Police Department gave to more than 400 people on its “Heat List.” The list, an attempt to identify the people most likely to commit violent crime in the city, was created with a predictive algorithm that focused on factors including, per the Chicago Tribune, “his or her acquaintances and their… Read More

Startups start with talent, and the talent, as we all know, seems to get younger every year. But it wouldn’t happen if children themselves were not introduced to the word of technology and engineering early, and shown that it can be a fun, creative environment. For the last 6 years, a pioneer of this in the UK has been Young Rewired State, a non-profit founded by Emma Mulqueeny, which… Read More

TechCrunch interviews Eileen Burbidge, Partner at London VC firm Passion Capital, where we discuss her early days working at Skype and Apple, the types of startups she invests in, her close ties to the U.K. government, the upcoming EU in-out referendum, and women in technology. Read More

“The minute a major Silicon Valley VC sets up a branch in Mexico, you will be out of business,” a Mexican founder told me over dinner at last year’s Mexico VC Day in San Francisco. I did not respond, because I actually think our risk of going out of business is higher if they don’t come. And we don’t expect them to come in the near future. Read More

Latest Crunch Report

From something as simple as a door sensor at a store to the new age of “smart” sensors in a rapidly emerging wearables market, the application of sensors has already permeated many parts of our everyday lives. But the future of dynamic sensor applications goes beyond just measuring your heart rate through the new Apple Watch. Read More

It’s no secret that the growth of publicly available data, or open data, is more prevalent than ever. From government databases, such as those aggregated by Data.gov, to data made available via tools such as Google Places API — the public has access to an overwhelming amount of information. Read More

About a year ago, Michael Lopp joined Pinterest as the company’s head of engineering — filling in the leadership of the engineering side next to co-founder Evan Sharp and CEO Ben Silbermann.
Much of his role, since joining, has been to help teams at Pinterest, which consist of units of engineers, designers and product managers, mesh and work well together. Lopp comes from both… Read More

Thursday was, I think, a historic day–though whether it becomes a memorable milestone like the launch of the Altair 8800, or an obscure footnote à la CP/M, remains to be seen. Thursday was the day that the Ethereum Project finally launched, after much sound and fury, including raising ~US$10 million (in Bitcoin.) It’s a fascinating, wildly ambitious project, and it is vaporware… Read More

On the heels of Homejoy’s failure, the fundamental “on-demand marketplace” model has come into question by investors, the media and even consumers. That questioning is very relevant, as there has been an overload of VC money that has been injected in the on-demand service platform space over the past few years ($4 billion-plus in 2014). Read More

Founders are often puzzled by how VCs derive valuations for competitive Series A rounds. A competitive Series A round is an equity round where a company generally raises greater than $5 million led by a top-quartile venture capital firm. During these Series A rounds, it is not uncommon for founders to receive multiple term sheets from lead investors at different valuations, and to feel… Read More

Yahoo bought Polyvore in what we’ve heard could be a $60 million deal today. Both Polyvore and Yahoo were mum on those details, but Polyvore co-founder Jess Lee did tell TechCrunch her company will continue to do the same thing as it’s been doing before – now on a larger scale and with more resources from the tech giant run by Marissa Mayer. Read More

The World Bank says that farmers need to produce 50% more food to feed the 9 billion people who will inhabit the earth by 2050. While farmers are facing higher demand, they have fewer resources to work with thanks to a growing water crisis and the availability of arable land. Join us at SF Disrupt 2015 as FarmLogs CEO Jesse Vollmar walks us through tech’s possible solutions. Read More

Beme is a new video-sharing app built by viral filmmaker Casey Neistat. However, instead of hitting a record button and watching the screen to see what you’re filming, you capture video by covering your iPhone’s proximity sensor. The idea is that by not seeing what you are about to post, Beme allows you to share the real, unedited version of who you are.

Apple Watch OS limitations and possibilities, Roku now has the ability to use Dropbox, Nvidia recalls Shield tablets that have the potential to overheat and combust, Uber closes a new round of funding that will value company at $50B.